A common activity that occurs during construction and mining is moving of material. This is most efficiently done by using a loading machine to pick up the material via a loading tool, and another type of haul machine or device to haul away the material. A significant problem is positioning of the haul machine or device relative to the loading tool in an efficient manner. The present disclosure contemplates that mining operations involve large vehicles and machines, including mining trucks and shovels. Moving such large vehicles is conventionally a time-consuming process due to safety concerns and difficulties in navigating while driving and/or parking.
One use of large vehicles in mining operations includes transporting excavated materials (for example, soil, rock, ore, coal, and/or sand) to locations within and/or away from a mining site. Conventional mining trucks include a cab for the vehicle's operator and a truck body for receiving and hauling material. Many vehicle operations, including aligning a vehicle relative to a shovel to receive material from the shovel (i.e., spotting), involve difficult and/or dangerous maneuvers due to the scale of the machinery involved and the degree (or lack thereof) of visibility for the operator from the cab.
When spotting a large vehicle such as a mining truck near a shovel, which for human-operated vehicles is often accomplished by an iterative process of an operator of the shovel issuing positioning and/or repositioning instructions to an operator of the mining truck, the operator must align the mining truck substantially near and under the shovel to reduce spillage of material during transfer from the shovel to the mining truck's truck body. At the same time, the mining truck operator must be cautious to avoid backing into the shovel during the spotting process. Accidents may occur or respotting may be necessary due to limited visibility and/or lack of operator skill. If an operator requires multiple attempts to properly spot the mining truck under the shovel, time and fuel may be wasted during respotting process. Efficiency may improve with operator experience, with the operation of a give type of haul machine and/or a particular loading site, but there is a very limited supply of very experienced operators. Repositioning the shovel relative to the mining truck is generally a much slower, more impractical, and more dangerous procedure. Automated machines have an added problem of requiring precise position information since an operator is not present. Although GPS may be used to assist in positioning of machines, GPS without corrections lacks the accuracy needed to prevent spilling. Additionally, GPS information is often unavailable or of limited availability at many mining sites.
There are existing techniques for automatically positioning cargo carrying machines with respect to a target. U.S. Pat. No. 7,010,404 to Ichijo et al., for example, relates to a camera being used to pick up an image of a mark, automatically recognizing the mark, determining a position of the camera based on a size and position of the mark within an image captured by the camera, determining a deviation in positions of cargo-handling forks and a target position, and automatically positioning the forks until the deviation becomes zero.
In an effort to increase efficiency of mining operations to avoid wasting time in spotting or respotting machinery for transferring materials, and to reduce accidents arising from such activities, improvements in positioning information and operation, for human-operated, semi-automatic machines, or automatic machines may be beneficial.